Picture of Innocence

Picture of Innocence

Lloyd & Hill [9]

Jill McGown

UK (1998)

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• Jill McGown
  
• Spring
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Summer
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  

Jill McGown, who died in 2007, lived in Northamptonshire and was best known for her mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Lloyd and Sergeant Judy Hill. The first novel,
A Perfect Match
, was published in 1983 and
A Shred of Evidence
was made into a television drama starring Philip Glenister and Michelle Collins.

‘Death threats? Away, man.’ Mike McQueen’s Tyneside accent had been modified by years of working and living wherever he saw the potential for building development and by the wealthy lifestyle he had thus acquired, but he liked to remind people of his working-class roots from time to time. His wife wished he wouldn’t. He raised his eyebrows at the good-looking young man who was helping his cameraman attach the microphone.

‘Window’d be favourite,’ muttered the cameraman. ‘Trees in the background, blossom on the grass, raindrops on the window.’

‘Death threats,’ repeated Curtis Law. He was one of the reporters from Aquarius TV, their regional network, his light brown hair cut and styled in a way that only media people could be bothered to keep their hair, his suit sober but stylish. And he was whippet-thin, of course. Mike had been like that once, thirty years ago.

‘He’s been getting them since January. You must have heard about them, Mr McQueen, even in this desirable ivory tower of yours.’

Mike smiled. He had once been
very
like young Mr Law. Eager, sharp, a bit on the cheeky side. A barrow boy, really, with the polish that even a state education gave you, if you put it to good use, but a barrow boy all the same. Sixty years of staying alive had knocked a lot of it out of him, and it would knock it out of Curtis Law too, in time. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about them. But I doubt if there’s anyone in this village who hasn’t wanted to kill Bernard Bailey at one time or another. I also doubt that they’re serious, unfortunately.’

Law grinned. ‘Wait till we’ve got the videotape running,’ he said.

Mike smiled again. ‘I won’t
say
anything like that when you’ve got it running. You should know that by now.’ He took a cigar from a box on the desk, then belatedly, and with no expectation of acceptance, offered the box to the other two.

He didn’t overeat; he didn’t drink to excess; he was kind to animals and small children. Smoking was, when he came to think of it, his only vice, though he would succumb to another if he was given the chance. Not that he would be – she didn’t think of him like that. He was an old man as far as she was concerned. She called him Mr McQueen.

The cameraman shook his head, but Law, to Mike’s surprise, took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘I’ll stick to these, if that’s all right,’ he said.

Mike waved away the gold lighter which Law held out; you needed a match to light a decent cigar. ‘Surely the death threats are old news,’ he said.

‘These ones are different,’ said Law. ‘They’re obscene. And explicit as to how he’ll die.’

Mike knew that too, but he feigned slight, and uninterested, surprise. ‘Is that right?’ he said. ‘Fancy.’

‘But who would actually issue death threats over this business?’ Law asked, the cigarette burning between his lips as he concentrated on what he was doing. ‘That’s the sort of thing I’ll be asking you. I mean – you want his land, he doesn’t want to sell … you seem a prime suspect. Scare him out.’

Mike sat at the desk as instructed by the cameraman, side on to the view of the trees silhouetted against the pale grey sky, and drew thoughtfully on his cigar. ‘I don’t mind telling you that I’m pissed off with the whole business,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t believe the sort of money Bailey’s turning down just so he can hang on to a piece of land he doesn’t farm any more. But I’m not creeping round his farm in the middle of the night leaving death threats.’

‘Oh, bugger,’ said the cameraman. ‘ Is that guy going to clear away the blossom?’

Mike saw his gardener walking purposefully across the lawn with a rake, and nodded. ‘ ’Fraid so,’ he said, with no intention of disrupting the man’s work to suit a couple of TV types. He’d have thought a gardener clearing the fallen blossom would have been fine, like a scene from a thirties musical. But it was, it seemed, merely distracting. After some discussion, he found himself sitting at the desk like a schoolboy, with the cameraman to his right. The background was his bookcase.

‘Do you read a lot?’ asked the cameraman.

‘Yes,’ said Mike. ‘ I read several books at once. At the moment, I’m reading—’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Level’s fine. We’re ready.’

Mike laid his cigar down in the ashtray, and placed it beyond the camera’s range. These days it was more than your life was worth to be seen smoking on the box, even something as civilized as a Havana cigar.

Law reached over, stubbed out his cigarette, and began the interview. ‘Mr McQueen, who do
you
think is responsible for these death threats?’ he asked, and tilted the microphone in Mike’s direction.

‘Well, I understand that I’m the prime suspect,’ said Mike, smiling broadly. ‘But all I’m doing is offering to buy Mr Bailey’s land – whether or not he sells it to me is entirely up to him.’

‘But you are very keen to buy?’

‘I have to build a road to the Rookery. The alternative is to go through a large tract of woodland whose owners are quite willing to sell. It’s costing me time and money trying to persuade Mr Bailey to sell me his land instead.’

‘Why spend the time and money?’ asked Law. ‘ Why not just go ahead with the alternative route? Wouldn’t that make more business sense?’

‘I have no wish to make any more impact on the environment than is necessary,’ Mike answered, smoothly and expertly, right down to the concerned look. ‘Even the environmentalists agree that unused fields are better candidates for development than much-loved and ancient woodland – perhaps they’re sending death threats. All I can tell you is that I’m not.’

‘And you are prepared to take a loss in order to conserve the countryside?’ The tone was faintly mocking, the eyes cynical. ‘ It wouldn’t be because you actually live in Harmston, and you don’t want this road in your
own
back yard?’

‘Partly,’ said Mike, with what he hoped would be seen as disarming honesty. ‘My wife and I have lived in this community for almost eighteen months, and we very much enjoy it here. I’ve no wish to be responsible for the loss of a natural amenity.’

In previous interviews on the subject of Bailey’s farm he had been on the side of the angels for possibly the first time in his life. But the death threats had put a new spin on the story; now it was Bailey himself who was under threat, and the tone of the interview had altered. Bailey was being seen as a man persecuted, driven to breaking point by the pressure to sell land which he had every right not to sell. And Mike was the property developer who had brought about this unhappy state of affairs, who was plundering the countryside for his own gain, and who was attempting to shift the blame for that on to Bailey, whose only crime was to own land that he wasn’t farming. Once again, Mike was wearing a black hat. But he was used to that, and he parried the questions with ease. He had appeared on more regional television news programmes than young Mr Law had, he was sure.

‘Mike McQueen, thank you very much,’ said Law, wrapping up the interview. He stood up. ‘Would it be all right to do a few reaction shots?’

‘Of course,’ said Mike, retrieving his cigar. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

He left his study by the French window, going out into the warm, wet May morning, relighting the cigar under the shelter of the roofed terrace and watching the smoke as it drifted through the soft, fine rain that fell on to the lush grass of his lawn, now cleared of the blossom his gardener found untidy. The grass had had its first few mowings of the season, and was still cut high. Soon, the blades would be set lower, then lower still, until it was at its summer height. He smiled a little at himself, at his surroundings.

He had grown up in a back-to-back in Newcastle with a concrete yard and an outside toilet. He had left school at fifteen, and had got a job as a tea boy on a building site. He had seen even then the potential in property, and had learned everything he could about building and builders. By the time he was twenty, he had bought his first derelict row of cottages, and by the time he was twenty-two, he had had money in the bank, something his father had never achieved. That was when he had met and married Shirley, a service widow with a three-year-old daughter. They had tried for another baby, but it wasn’t to be, and thus it was that when Shirley’s daughter left home, they had found themselves with just one another for the first time. If, since then, the marriage had evolved into one merely of companionship, it didn’t really bother Mike. He had become a rich man, which had always been his true objective, and when this final project was complete he and Shirley would retire in luxury, and remain companions until death did them part.